Hi, I've posted here so we don't get more off-topic in the GBS thread.

Thanks for the information and advice, kingshriek. I still haven't tried ripping lengthy CD music yet (ever try to rip Dungeon Explorer II's PSG tunes?). But anyway, here are my first HES rips. I started with the music to Cratermaze, because I already could see how Doraemon was ripped. Cratermaze's music is almost completely different from Doraemon's, and it's great. If you've played the original arcade game, Booby Kids (aka Kid no Horehore Daisakusen), then you'll recognize the same tunes.

I also ripped Yo, Bro, because of the great Beach Boys tunes. This was a bit tough (need a good tracing emulator, dammit!) but I managed to rip it in the end.

Last, I tried Pomping World (Buster Bros.) on CD. It doesn't use the System Card PSG driver, just its own little music driver in 8k. So, that was a very simple rip.

Good job on the rips. I actually had no idea Cratermaze was based of a Doraemon game (hadn't played Meikyuu Daisakusen) based on an original arcade game. Interesting that the US got a more artistically accurate port while Japan got a license makeover.

Regarding Dungeon Explorer II, I forgot that the game had PSG tunes. Upon looking at a save state, it looks to be a straightforward System Card rip - a good CD game to start with (so I'll hold off on ripping it). Another game I have that I haven't been considering is Star Parodia - I only recall one PSG tune (midboss music). Maybe it deserves getting looked at (could have more significant PSG music).

And yes, we should take this to the ME forums. This thread (and the GBS one as well) don't really belong here.

Okay, I looked at Dungeon Explorer II, and it indeed was easy to find the music routines and rip. The hard part was actually making an HES header that interfaces well with the CD PSG routines and the ripped data. I used the headers and player program from some of your CD rips, but I found it was actually much easier just to use the game's routines to interface with the System Card PSG routines. I just NOPed out anything that would write to the MPRs.

Star Parodier has a few PSG songs, like at the end of a level, and the Battle Game title screen. I didn't want to try ripping it because it sounds like it uses ADPCM samples, which would complicate things and could not be heard anyway.

Yeah, the template I use for System Driver rips is set up in a very general way. It is not always the case that the game's init code is lumped together with the music data (and from my experience, this isn't common). And when the init code is separated, it is cleaner to relocate only the necessary code rather than place the whole 8K bank that it resides in into the HES rip.

Also, looking at the DE2 rip, it looks like you used one of my older CD rips as a reference, though it's good to see that you went through $E0E1 instead of what I did in my early rips - that is only using $C2EF inside the driver. The problem with this is that timing is handled outside the PSG driver bank, so for my early rips I was writing to $0C00 explicitly to set up the timer. This becomes a problem when different songs use different timer values, as what I first encountered in Doukyuusei (I later redid the rip properly). I scanned through my old rips, and none appear to use different timer values, so my old rips are safe from what I overlooked (listening to them confirms this). If you're going to use one of my System Card driver rips as a reference in the future, I recommend Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon - it's probably the cleanest example of a properly done rip that I've done.

It's too bad about ADPCM. I have refrained from releasing anymore ADPCM-less* rips (I don't want to have a lot of these to fix if it does get supported somehow). I really wanted to do Cyber City Oedo 808, too.

*That is, refering to games that use ADPCM for drum samples. I haven't given any thought to songs that are entirely comprised of ADPCM.

OK, here's my final rip to cap off a fun weekend. It's Maniac Pro Wrestling, which has some fantastic music, never mind the lame idea of a wrestling RPG.

The composer is familiar (same as Legendary Axe II), but it's actually a team-up of two familiar, and equally astoundingly-talented, musicians that usually work for Atlus. Because they have a similar sound, I'll make a post over at the MagicEngine board about them.

Not only is it a cover, but the Highscore music is the same as MOTR. I'm also pretty sure the Bermuda Triangle song has a few notes copied from "Comic Bakery" or "The Last Ninja". The whole soundtrack is pretty C-64-esque.

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